THERE’S A NEW Smarter Harper’s Index up. It’s a good one.

HERE’S A NEW CRIME-RELATED BLOG from what its writer seems to think is a lefty point of view, though I don’t find a whole lot to disagree with there and a lot of folks seem to think I’m some sort of anti-lefty. Anyway, it’s worth a look, though it needs permalinks.

NZ BEAR reports on evidence of weird Al Qaeda support for Bush. Er, or perhaps bad writing coupled with bad translation.

THERE’S A NEW TENNESSEE BLOGGER, and he’s identified a major-media goof — which, in a sort of corollary to Kaus’s law, occurs in an article telling us how dumb ordinary Americans are. (Via Rich Hailey).

RAND SIMBERG adds to the blogger pile-on of the L.A. Times’ Tim Rutten.

I’VE LONG SINCE quit wasting my time with warbloggerwatch, so I had to find out from Steven Chapman that they’re obsessed with the size of my penis.

Heh. They can’t handle the truth.

A RELIGION OF PEACE? Check out this photo, one of a seemingly-endless series. I said that Palestinian culture is turning into a psychotic death cult. A few people didn’t like that, but they can’t seem to explain this stuff away — they just try to change the subject.

THOMAS A. KELLEY, who’s in charge of the September 11 investigation, obstructed Justice in the Waco probe, the Washington Post reports.

You know, words fail me at just how pathetic this is. And it’s going to give more credence to theories that the FBI hasn’t been giving us the straight dope since Oklahoma City and before.

If we can’t trust these guys to be honest on this stuff, how can we trust them with the powers they want to fight Al Qaeda?

ESCAPED ROBOT: But there’s nothing to worry about.

JOHN ELLIS is really down on Yahoo. I think his column is dead-on.

SADDAM FAKES DEAD BABY FUNERALS, in order to blame sanctions, reports the BBC. (Via Matt Welch).

WELL,SOMEONE AT THE L.A. TIMES likes blogs, at least well enough to lift some phrases from InstaPundit reader Jorge Schmidt, reports Matt Welch. I’m pretty skeptical of these parallelisms, but this one certainly is striking.

UPDATE: The LAT’s writer says she didn’t get it there, and Matt’s taking her at her word.

HOW FARM SUBSIDIES ARE KILLING PEOPLE AND PROSPERITY in Africa:

Africans need the chance to compete with the few things they have: cheap sun and cheap labour. They need access to the world’s markets. And yet several of their richest potential markets are ring-fenced by tariffs and other protectionist measures designed to keep Western farmers in business. The EU and the US in particular are engaged in a protection racket designed to keep rural constituencies and their media fan clubs in some sort of acquiescence.

It is hard to assess the damage protectionism does to the farmers of the poor world, but bodies like the OECD routinely put it in the range of billions of dollars, and suggest it far outranks the aid we send.

Yes, the damage is huge.

SOMEONE IS FINALLY SPEAKING OUT against elvish imperialism.

E-BAY WILL BE OFFERING HEALTH INSURANCE to its high-volume sellers. This seems like an excellent move for e-Bay, and for the sellers.

IAIN MURRAY has some hopeful observations on the direction of European politics. I hope he’s right.

AN ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN READING FOR A WHILE KNOWS, I’ve been deeply skeptical of the whole “homeland security” thing for a while. This anti-whistleblowing provision only underscores my skepticism.

This isn’t about protecting America. It’s about protecting bureaucrats.

KAUS / RUTTEN SMACKDOWN: Mickey Kaus responds to Tim Rutten’s Los Angeles Times screed about weblogs. Excerpt:

In what seems to be an iron law applying to pieces by mainstream journalists huffing about blogger inaccuracy, Rutten’s piece itself contains a non-trivial inaccuracy, attributing to me words (describing how W & B sometimes revealed “unsubstantiated or simply wrong information”) that were actually written by historian Stanley Kutler and were clearly identified as such (see the item in the 6/19 entries below). The misreporting is non-trivial because it conveniently avoids the need for Rutten to mention that it was Kutler, who isn’t a narcissistic blogger, who initially made the point Rutten’s dismissing.. (It goes without saying that if Rutten were a blogger he’d have corrected his mistake by now, but since he works for a “serious newspaper” the falsehood will probably stand uncorrected forever.)

Advantage: Kaus! There’s a lot more in Kaus’s response, too. Follow his links to read extensive and unflattering responses to Rutten’s piece from Matt Welch and Ken Layne.

THE POST’S OMBUDSMAN is fact-checking FAIR over the Ohio State University story. It’s true that SpinSanity had this story nearly a week ago (Advantage: Blogosphere!) but it’s nice to see that the Post reads SpinSanity.

I’M DISAPPOINTED that this George Will column didn’t mention the problems at SFSU, UCSD, Orange Coast Community College, etc. But it does contain one quotable passage:

This year’s enactment of yet more campaign finance regulations that expand government restrictions on the quantity of political speech is just the latest confirmation of what professor Martin Shapiro of the University of California School of Law at Berkeley noted in 1996. He wrote that “almost the entire First Amendment literature produced by liberal academics in the past 20 years has been a literature of regulation, not freedom — a literature that balances away speech rights. . . . Its basic strategy is to treat freedom of speech not as an end in itself, but an instrumental value.”

Yeah, and not even much of an instrumental value. It would be overly harsh to say that much of the left’s enthusiasm for free speech vanished as soon as communists no longer needed it. But the thought has occurred to me, and it’s one reason why I stopped considering myself part of the left.

STANLEY HAUERWAS is a good friend of my father’s, and my father thinks he’s pretty smart. I’ve been “aware” of his work for a long time, but I’m not really that deeply familiar with it: I leave the theology to my pa. The statements made by Hauerwas in this article are so profoundly idiotic — and worse yet for a philospher, incoherent and contradictory — that I find it hard to believe that he said them as reported. On the other hand, I seem to recall my father saying that no one could be a good enough Christian to satisfy Stanley, and suggesting that such demandingness misconstrued the point of Christianity. That view certainly shines through in this article.

UPDATE: Reader Telford Work writes:

I agree that in that National Catholic Reporter article, Stanley Hauerwas sounds like an idiot.

But Hauerwas is not an idiot. I studied with him (though not as my dissertation advisor) at Duke. The coherence of his position follows from the ramifications (as he sees them, anyway) of taking the lordship of Jesus Christ more seriously than anything else. The NCR article bypassed this and neglected needed theological background, in favor of stringing together a list of quotations made all the more provocative for being, er, “lightly contextualized.”

I don’t agree with Hauerwas on everything, but I do agree that proper Christians will be faithful to the teaching and reign of Jesus above all else — even country, family, and cultural plausibility structures if necessary — and this will lead Christians to engage in practices that don’t make sense to people who put their ultimate priorities elsewhere, or who pay lip service to Christian faith but haven’t let the logic of the cross challenge their deepest beliefs.

The article mentions a Time article on Hauerwas by Jean Bethke Elshtain. This is a much better introduction.

Yeah, he’s not an idiot. Though I think he’s a bit too williing to play the provocateur in ways that tend to make him sound like an idiot, such that the distinction may become a rather fine one at times.

DOC SEARLS HAS A GREAT POST on the star-making machinery as the core of what the RIAA/MPAA/CARP fights are really all about. And scroll up and down for other excellent observations on related topics.

HERE’S A COOL APPLICATION OF NANOTUBES as filters for purifying drugs, hormones, etc.

HAVING FALLEN BEHIND ON MY BLOGGING, I just ran across this column by Jonah Goldberg. It’s excellent:

No, what makes you Nazi-like is the worship of power, particularly the power to murder, especially when you don’t have it. You don’t have to commit genocide to be a Nazi; you just have to want to commit genocide. Does anyone doubt that if given the chance, there would be countless Arab groups or governments who would leap at the opportunity to wipe out all of the Jews? One need only take their word for it.

Ultimately, though, by claiming that Israel is the villain in this passion play, it becomes possible to hide the truth in plain sight.

When I downplayed the threat of a possible Nazi regime in America, I heard countless people saying I was akin to the Germans who “closed their drapes” as the Jews were rounded up. Obviously, this is as stupid as it is offensive.

But there are people closing their drapes today. They’re the ones who see and hear about the things going on in the Middle East every day, but continue to hide behind silly libels against America and phrases like “Israeli oppression.”

Indeed.

EGYPT IS TRYING TO GET NUCLEAR WEAPONS, according to reports noted by Charles Johnson. And maybe Saudi Arabia, too.

You know, the arguments for a return to colonialism that I so snidely dismissed last fall are looking better all the time. I shudder to think that things may come to such a pass that Ann Coulter will be looked upon as prophetic, rather than deranged.

UPDATE: Charles Austin emails: “She might be both. Most prophets are.”

Meanwhile reader “Reinhard Heydrich, Jr.” writes:

The fact that israel has nuclear weapons doesn’t trouble you at all.

Why should Egypt or Saudi Arabia having the same weapons make you uneasy ?

Some questions answer themselves. As do some questioners. But to state the obvious, I guess it’s because I’m not worried that the Israelis will smuggle nukes into New York.